Huffington Post contributor Rachel Grob describes West Nyack’s Blue Rock School as rugged and unpredictable, open to interpretation, negotiation, and discovery by each child. She’s not talking about the educational curriculum — she’s describing the playground outside the school.

“At most suburban schools, play spaces are homogenized. Fields are flat stretches of grass or turf; playgrounds are focused around narrow, manufactured variations on the theme of climbing equipment; a hard surface is available for games like foursquare and hopscotch. It’s easy to tell, right away, how decidedly the Blue Rock School in West Nyack, NY, has departed from this norm,” writes Grob in the Huffington Post.

Grob, who is an Associate Dean at Sarah Lawrence College, has two children who have attended school at Blue Rock. Her article originally appeared in Education for Meaning and Social Justice.